2024 Bestsellers So Far

Thu 12 Dec 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers| Posted by: Gavin

Here are two versions of our 2024 bestsellers so far: the first is from NPD/Bookscan which captures between 50-70% of sales for our books. The second is Combined Net Sold Print Units from our distributor, Consortium — which means books shipped out minus books returned. The two lists are quite different! (Here’s 2023’s list.)

Thanks to all our authors and to every reader, librarian, bookseller, und so weiter who took a chance on some Small Beer fiction, slightly weird this year. We only published two books, Kathleen Jennings’s Kindling and we’re still slowly organizing the limited edition of The Book of Love. We’re also trying to ship out the new issue of LCRW which is directly related to how much time I spend on the couch.

If you’d like to order some books, we’d love to ship them out to you (with a bonus book for luck). Order here.

 

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Top 5 Bestsellers 2023

Tue 19 Dec 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro, Bestsellers, Kij Johnson, Nathan Ballingrud, Sarah Pinsker, Sarah Rees Brennan| Posted by: Gavin

Here are our top 5 bestsellers so far this year by numbers shipped from our distributor:

1. Sarah Pinsker, Lost Places
   
2. Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters
3. Kij Johnson, The Privilege of the Happy Ending
4. Anya Johanna DeNiro, OKPsyche
5. Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands

In 2023 we published the Liminals series capper from Ayize Jama-Everett, Heroes from Another World. Ayize had an amazing year: he published 3 books (including a great Afrofuturistic graphic novel The Last Count of Monte Cristo) and put out a documentary, A Table of Our Own: “an extraordinary and thought-provoking documentary that delves into the rich tapestry of the African-American experience, exploring the intersection of psychedelic substance use, spirituality and the pursuit of social justice.”

We followed Ayize’s novel with Sarah Pinsker’s second collection which was included in Slate’s Best Books of the Year.

Then came Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche — I think the review I enjoyed most was Jake Casella Brookins in Locus which started off, “I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is” and leapt off into the kind of review that I alwayshope to read of a book I love.

Our final book of the year was Kij Johnson’s The Privilege of the Happy Ending. 10 years in the making, it’s a weird and wide-ranging collection and was recently reviewed in the Washington Post by Michael Dirda.

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A Locus Bestseller

Wed 1 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, Locus, Sarah Pinsker| Posted by: Gavin

Bestseller lists are weird things. None of them turn out to be as simple as I’d expect — except, I suppose the ones I make for Book Moon because that they are what they say they are: a list of bestselling books in the store.

Anyway, this hardly a thought never mind an exploration of the concept comes from celebrating Sarah Pinsker’s recent collection Lost Places just slipping onto the August bestseller list as reported in the new issue of Locus.

Have other Small Beer titles been Locus bestsellers? Could this be our first bestseller? Can we get it to appear on other lists? I have no idea! In the meantime, we’ll celebrate having possibly the only short story collection on the list this month!

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SBP BS Bestsellers

Fri 6 Jan 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, Naomi Mitchison, Nathan Ballingrud, Sarah Rees Brennan| Posted by: Gavin

2022 was an odd year for the press. I am working at 1/4-speed, we published fewer books and while we did 2 issues of LCRW the mailing has been delayed into the new year as the Book Moon peeps are doing inventory.

In BookScan news — the BS above — here are our top 14 bestsellers of 2022. I imagine many readers of this post will have read a good number of the books on this list. Sometimes our books hit right away (In Other Lands), sometimes they grow and grow (North American Lake Monsters), sometimes they go away and come back (Travel Light). 

2023 will be a good book year. Looking forward to it.

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2018 By the Numbers

Mon 4 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, Books, ebooks, Publishing| Posted by: Gavin

While collecting info and working on 2018 taxes and royalties, I thought it would be fun (for me at least) to look at some 2018 sales numbers — or at least some relative numbers. This is still true:

Congratulations to my friend @cassieclare whose new book QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS just sold more copies in one week than we’ve sold all year! (SO FAR! You never know, right?) What fun—can’t wait to read: https://t.co/olnLAe9NCa pic.twitter.com/vQy2Ac2Oxo

— Small Beer Press (@smallbeerpress) December 17, 2018

In terms of sales, 2018 seems to have been our best year yet — thank you authors, booksellers, and writers! And since 2017 when we raised LCRW pay rates to $0.03/word for fiction subscriptions have started going up again. Subscription choices R us.

What had been a resurgence of print sales in the last few years dropped off a little as ebooks rose to just less than a third of total sales. Here’s a chart comparing our print to ebook sales from 2010 to 2018. We’ve been selling ebooks since at least 2005 and you can see that in 2010 print still held about 90% of sales. That dropped to 50% by 2014 — which is why lots of people were very worried about the future. I’m glad to see the rebalancing that’s happened in the last couple of years. However, I don’t think too much can be made from this chart as Small Beer sales aren’t a good snapshot of publishing in general: our sales volumes are too low, publishing schedules too irregular, and too easily impacted by variations in the sales of one or two books.

Of those books sold, here are our 2018 Top 10 Bestsellers

1. Sarah Rees Brennan · In Other Lands (2017)
2. Kij Johnson · At the Mouth of the River of Bees (2012)
3. Ursula K. Le Guin · Words Are My Matter (2016)
4. * Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
5. * John Schoffstall · Half-Witch
6. * Claire G. Coleman · Terra Nullius
7. * Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
8. * Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster
9. Nathan Ballingrud · North American Lake Monsters (2013)
10. Kelly Link · Stranger Things Happen (2001)

Notes:

1. This bestseller list is made up of net sales (gross sales minus returns) of our print and ebook editions.
2. These are not NPD/Bookscan figures or sales from Consortium our distributor.
3. This list does not include any ebooks that were included in Humble Bundle or StoryBundles.
4. This list does not include copies sold to book clubs.
5. I’ve put a * by the five 2018 titles that made this list: new books keepin’ the lights on!
6. Hey, doubters: short story collections sell.

Our 2018 bestseller came out in 2017: Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands is a powerhouse. We have a paperback coming in September which I expect will be our 2019 bestseller.

Kij Johnson’s collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees came roaring back in at #2 due to thousands of copies being picked up to go with a textbook which contains her unforgettable story “Ponies.”

#3, ach.

Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters continues to do well — I imagine partly because of the upcoming film based on one of his stories (not included in this book) and partly because NALM has scared the heck out of a reader they then pass it on to scare the heck out of a friend.

And coming in at #10 is the first book we published and one of the main reasons we get to keep publishing books, Kelly’s perennially solid selling debut Stranger Things Happen.

I saw that in a previous post like this [2011 · 2012 · 2013 — I know I was too depressed in the last couple of years to do these] I’d also noted which books were included in the annual Locus Recommended Reading list, so here are our 2018 titles on the just-released list, alphabetically by title:

1. Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster
2. Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
3. Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
4. Maria Romasco Moore, “Dying Light,” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #37)
5. John Schoffstall · Half-Witch

Did we really just publish 3 collections all beginning with A? Weird. And look at all that black and orange below.

Not everything we published made the list, but it was a good showing none the less. Congratulations to all the writers on the list, it is a great thing to be read. Feel free to vote for these books and any other faves in the Locus survey. And to those authors not on the list, next time.

Here’s our plan for 2019 and 2020, should we all survive, is looking good. Thanks for reading this and any (or all!) of the books and zines we published in 2018.

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Bestsellers & Locus Rec Reading 2013

Mon 3 Feb 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Angelica Gorodischer, Bestsellers, Elizabeth Hand, Howard Waldrop, Kij Johnson, Nathan Ballingrud, Sofia Samatar, Susan Stinson, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

Here are two different views of 2013 in SBP books. What will 2014 bring? Droughts! Witches! Yetis! More and more weird fun!

Congratulations to all the authors on the 2013 Locus recommended reading list. It’s always fun to peruse the list and see, for whatever reasons, what rose up and what didn’t. It’s especially nice to have links to all the online short stories and novellas and so on, thanks Mark et al!

In 2013, we published 2 Peter Dickinson reprints, one chapbook, and six new titles, and of those six, four titles are on the list:

1. Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
2. Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters: Stories
3. Angelica Gorodischer (trans. Amalia Gladhart), Trafalgar
4. Howard Waldrop, Horse of a Different Color: Stories

And you can go and vote in the Locus awards poll here. I have some reading to do before I vote. Votes for Small Beer authors and titles are always appreciated, thank you!

In sales, once again our celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantastic short stories were our best sellers for the year. However, if we split the two volumes into separate sales, Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others would climb a notch to #2. But! Counting them as one means we get another title into the top 5: Elizabeth Hand’s late 2012 collection Errantry: Strange Stories. We really should release more books at the start of the year, as those released at the end have much less chance of getting into the top 5.

According to Neilsen BookScan (i.e. not including bookfairs, our website, etc.), our top five bestsellers (excluding ebooks) for 2013 were:

1. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
   Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
2. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
3. Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees
4. Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree
5. Elizabeth Hand, Errantry: Strange Stories

Last year it was all short stories all the time, this year Susan Stinson’s historical novel Spider in a Tree jumped in (I’d have said sneaked in if it was #5, but since it’s at #4, that’s a jump!). Susan’s book is still getting great reviews, as with this from the Historical Novel Review which just came out this week:

“The book is billed as “a novel of the First Great Awakening,” and Stinson tries to do just that, presenting us with a host of viewpoints from colonists to slaves and even insects. She gives an honest imagining of everyday people caught up in extraordinary times, where ecstatic faith, town politics and human nature make contentious bedfellows. Although the novel was slow to pull me in, by the end I felt I had an intimate glance into the disparate lives of these 18th-century residents of Northampton, Massachusetts.”

As ever, thanks are due to the writers for writing their books, all the people who worked on the books with us, the great support we received from the independent bookstores all across the USA and Canada, and of course, the readers. We love these books and are so happy to find so many readers do, too: thank you!

    

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Small Beer Press Bestsellers 2012

Mon 7 Jan 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, Kij Johnson, Maureen F. McHugh, Ted Chiang, Three Messages, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

According to Neilsen BookScan, our top five Small Beer Press bestsellers (excluding ebooks) for 2012 were:

1. Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse
2. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
   Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
3. Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees
4. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
5. Eduardo Jiménez Mayo & Chris N. Brown, eds., Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic

All short story collections or anthologies! Our publication dates all crept into the latter half of the year, really the last couple of months, so books such as Errantry and Earth and Air didn’t get much time out there in the world to see how they’d do. Also #6? Stranger Things Happen, #7? The Serial Garden. Short stories!

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Small Beer &c, 2011

Wed 4 Jan 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, Karen Joy Fowler, Kathe Koja, Kelly Link, Maureen F. McHugh, Ted Chiang| Posted by: Gavin

Bookscan says our bestsellers were:

1) Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy
2) Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
3) Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
4) Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse
5) Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories

I know other things happened this year. We published one issue of LCRW with a lovely cover by Kathleen Jennings:

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 27

A. D. Jameson · Jessy Randall · K. M. Ferebee · Karen Heuler · M. K. Hobson · Carol Emshwiller · David Rowinski · Joan Aiken · Sarah Harris Wallman · Gwenda Bond · David Blair · Sarah Heller · Nicole Kimberling

And here are the books we published.

First Small Beer Press titles:

After the Apocalypse
Maureen F. McHugh

“Incisive, contemporary, and always surprising.”—Publishers WeeklyBest Books 2011: The Top 10

A Slepyng Hound to Wake
Vincent McCaffrey

“Henry is a character cut from Raymond Chandler: a modern knight on a mission to save those, and what, he loves.”—Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen

Paradise Tales
Geoff Ryman

* “Often contemplative and subtly ironic, the 16 stories in this outstanding collection work imaginative riffs on a variety of fantasy and SF themes”—Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)

The Child Garden
Geoff Ryman

Winner of the John W. Cambell and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories
Joan Aiken

* “Wildly inventive, darkly lyrical, and always surprising . . . a literary treasure.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Solitaire: a novel
Kelley Eskridge
A New York Times Notable Book, Borders Original Voices selection, and Nebula, Endeavour, and Spectrum Award finalist.

And one Big Mouth House title:

The Freedom Maze
Delia Sherman

“Adroit, sympathetic, both clever and smart, The Freedom Maze will entrap young readers and deliver them, at the story’s end, that little bit older and wiser.”
—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Out of Oz

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I don’t know the author or the title…

Mon 8 Aug 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, indie bookstore exclusives, Kelly Link, Paige M. Gutenborg| Posted by: Gavin

But, look, it’s the #1 paperback best seller at the Harvard Book Store! How awesome is that? Screen shot below—where Kelly’s 3 Zombie Stories (actual title: I Don’t Know the Author or the Title But It’s Red And It Has 3 Zombie Stories In It) holds back Alan Furst and Malcolm Gladwell from jousting for their usual spot.

I hope people are having fun asking for it!

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